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Richard Dreyfuss's Son Harry Alleges Kevin Spacey Groped Him at Age 18

Kevin Spacey

The son of the Oscar-winning actor wrote an account of Spacey groping him while his father was there running lines.

The accusations of sexual assault leveled at Kevin Spacey have piled up since Anthony Rapp's account of the 26-year-old Spacey sexually assaulting him when he was just 14 broke last week. The Rent and Star Trek: Discovery star's allegation lead to six more men coming forward before the dam broke and it was revealed that eight more men, all on the set of House of Cards, said that Spacey had harassed them on the job. Now, Harry Dreyfuss, who is an actor, writer, and the son of actor Richard Dreyfuss, has come forward with a first-hand account of Spacey groping him when he was an 18-year-old high school senior and Spacey was in his late 40s.

In an essay on Buzzfeed, Dreyfuss wrote that he'd accompanied his Oscar-winning father to Spacey's apartment while his dad pored over the script for Complicit, a play Spacey was directing at the Old Vic in London. Spacey, who sat next to Harry Dreyfuss on the couch asked the son to run lines with his dad who just several feet away as Spacey proceeded to run his hand up the young Dreyfuss's thigh.

"Finally (finally, finally) I became suspicious. It took that long because it just never occurred to me that Kevin would be interested in me in the first place. He was an adult man, a hero of mine, my dad's boss, none of which were categories on my radar for sexual interactions," Dreyfuss wrote. "Besides, I thought, Surely he can't be coming on to me like this right in front of my dad. But his hand stayed there."

Dreyfuss wrote that he got up and moved to the other side of the couch but Spacey followed him and continued until his hand was on the 18-year-old's crotch.

"Looking into his eyes, I gave the most meager shake of my head that I could manage. I was trying to warn him without alerting my dad, who still had his eyes glued to the page," Dreyfuss continued. "I thought I was protecting everyone. I was protecting my dad's career. I was protecting Kevin, who my dad surely would have tried to punch. I was protecting myself, because I thought one day I'd want to work with this man. Kevin had no reaction and kept his hand there."

The essay explains that Dreyfuss has since told the story of Spacey's groping him at parties over the years as some sort of apocryphal Hollywood tale, and although there were people who didn't laugh, who told him what Spacey did was wrong, Dreyfuss said he downplayed the incident as if something like that couldn't have happened to him.

But Rapp and the #MeToo movement of people who've been sexually harassed speaking up inspired him to finally speak out about the incident, Dreyfuss wrote.

"So to all the people who have spoken up already, about Kevin, about Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby, and Bill O'Reilly, and Roger Ailes, and all the women who have opened my eyes to how pervasive this problem is, I can't thank you enough. You helped me see that what was once treated as normal never deserved to be and that things we all could have condemned sooner were happening right under many of our noses," Dreyfuss wrote. "In minimizing my own experience all these years, I unwittingly played a role in minimizing it for everyone. That ends now."

Richard Dreyfuss told Buzzfeed News that he was unaware of the groping incident at the time and that he was only made aware of it some years later when his son told him about it.

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Tracy E. Gilchrist

Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP of Editorial and Special Projects at equalpride. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.
Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP of Editorial and Special Projects at equalpride. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.